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The life of Louise Andreas-Salome (b. ) was elliptical. She moved from one momentous meeting to the next—with Gillot, Ree, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Strindberg and Rodin, to name but a few—and with each step Rilke's poetry breathed in her wake (Kleinbard 1993). She was a renowned essayist, critic, journalist and novelist whose worldly ‘free thinking’ (Nietzsche to Lou, 2 July 1882, in Fuss and Shapiro 1971, p. 62), bequeathed to her by her most enduring mentor, Friedrich Nietzsche, prepared her for a lifetime of creativity and cultural criticism that brought her finally to rest in the heart of psychoanalysis. Although during her lifetime she achieved minor fame with her dissertation (Andreas-Salome 1894)—a controversial biography of Nietzsche and the first major study of his life—recognition of her contribution to psychoanalysis has been somewhat sporadic. H.F. Peters’ (1963) My Sister, My Spouse was the first in-depth study of Lou Andreas-Salome but in the main concentrated on her life before psychoanalysis and her contact primarily with Paul Ree and Nietzsche. In 1964 The Freud Journal (Andreas-Salome 1964), which told of her visit to Freud's inner circle in Vienna between 1912 and 1913, was published in translation by Stanley Leavy, who also wrote a fascinating biographical introduction. Rudolph Binion (1968) was the first to give Lou an in-depth and critical psychoanalytic reading. However, his incredibly dense though hugely erudite study did little to spur interest, not only because he treated Lou as a self-publicist, mythologizer and occasional liar, but also because he managed to turn her fascinating life and times into something bordering on the mundane (like wine into water, so to speak). Binion's study is nonetheless an indispensable sermon for the morning after one has drunk on Lou's history (but not to be taken before!)
Following Binion Lou was given a terse and quite unreasonable reading by Mitchell (1974) in Psychoanalysis and Feminism. Binion and